Massive Arrow Lake leak reveals Intel ditching new cores introduced with Meteor Lake, no Arc iGPU, and more

CPUs based on Intel’s next-gen desktop architecture, Arrow Lake, are reportedly releasing later this year with up to 24 cores, no hyperthreading, and Thunderbolt 5. Chinese leaker Golden Pig Upgrades has now confirmed previous rumors while offering more information regarding the Arrow Lake processors on Bilbili.

Intel Arrow Lake release date and naming scheme

First up, the leaker alleges that the Arrow Lake chips are a bit over six months away from launching. So, that would put the Arrow Lake release date sometime in Q4 of this year. 

Interestingly, the leaker reports that the ARL chips won’t be called the “15th-gen Core i” and would instead launch under the new “Core Ultra” naming scheme. Intel has already confirmed this change.

As a refresher, the company launched the Raptor Lake Refresh processors under the “14th-gen Core i” banner for desktops and high-performance mobile parts. However, the Meteor Lake CPUs for laptops launching as “Core Ultra” marked distinct naming schemes for desktop/high-performance notebook and efficiency-focused mobile CPUs. So with the ARL chips, Intel will finally move away from the traditional "Core i" branding.

Intel Arrow Lake specifications

Moving on, Golden Pig Upgrades confirms that the Arrow Lake CPUs lack hyperthreading as well as LP E-cores. While the news of Intel ditching Hyperthreading for ARL is not new, the absence of LP E-cores is a revelation. Intel introduced the Low Power Island E-cores (LP E-cores) in the Meteor Lake chips as a measure to enhance efficiency by offloading light and background tasks to the E-cores available on the SoC tile. Since ARL retains the tile-based design of Meteor Lake, one would expect the ARL parts to bring LP E-cores as previously rumored. Therefore, the report of their absence is a little surprising.

Additionally, we are also looking at Intel moving away from DDR4 as ARL chips could only support DDR5 memory like the Meteor Lake processors. If true, this would be the first time that desktop Intel CPUs drop DDR4 support.

When it comes to the iGPU, Golden Pig Upgrades alleges that the ARL CPUs bring an iGPU with only 4 Xe cores and hence won’t marketed under the “Intel Arc” brand. This is in line with the branding of the iGPU of Core Ultra 5 125U since it only packs 4 Xe cores. However, in stark contrast, past leaks have suggested an 8-core Xe LPG iGPU for the desktop parts bringing up to a 2.4x lead over the Core i9-13900K (Available on Amazon). So, we’ll have to wait and see what iGPU Arrow Lake ends up featuring.

Finally, the desktop Arrow Lake-S and mobile HX SKUs will reportedly retain the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) chipset like previous Intel processors and won’t match the “PCH-free solutions of AMD platforms”.

Intel Arrow Lake process node

Lastly, Golden Pig Upgrades maintains that Intel will use the 20A process only for the 14-core (6 P-cores + 8 E-cores) non-K Core Ultra 5 and lower-level ARL-S chips. For the laptop ARL parts, the company is sourcing “advanced process tiles” from TSMC possibly based on the TSMC N3B 3 nm process.

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